Teaching with Technology

I’m really annoyed with edublogs because of the adverts that they’ve started to put on their blogs. I’ve had to move the school blog across to wordpress which has been a bit of a pain in the bum! Not very happy at all!

This is the slideshow from my Bett Presentation on using Synchroneyes.   I did try to sort out some audio to go along with it, but as the presentation was 20min the audion file was massive an kept crashing.   So here it is for what its worth.

After chatting to Tom Barrett at Bett09 I’ve decided to try and get together a resource for teachers that are just starting out in trying to get into using simple web 2.0 tools in their classrooms. The mind map below is the start of that process. Hopefully people will make suggestions and collaborate to make it a really useful resource.

Any ideas / suggestions more than welcome.

Today I’m on my way down to Bett 09 the biggest technology show / conference in the UK.

In all the time that I’ve been involved in Ict in schools I have to my shame never actually made it to Bett before! This had been for all sorts of reasons, but mainly I think because of the cost.

The conference itself is free, but there’s always the train fare, possible hotel bills etc and that horrible feeling that your colleagues back at school think that trips like this are just a jolly!

This trip is different as the finance side of things has been taken care of very kindly by Stiljes, but I still have that slight nagging doubt that leaving the kids is in some way letting them down.

I know that this is irrational and that I’m sure I’ll come back buzzing with ideas, but I wonder how many other professions and professionals feel the same way about leaving the office?

Another exciting development of Bett will be the chance to meet what my wife terms ‘my funny friends’ off my Twitter network. To actually put names to faces will be a rather strange experience, should be great though !

It’s been quite some time since I last posted to the blog and I thought that I should get back to it.
This is a slightly self indulgent post, but I’m hoping that as I write it will help me to really understand what has happened over the last year.

When I think back to the start of the year I hadn’t really grasped the way in which the Internet was changing – I’m not sure that anyone had. If I’m honest I thought that I’d seen the ‘big change’… Little did I know!

I simply saw the web as a way of communicating and finding out information. Now I realize that the web is all about that but at a much deeper level than I previously thought. Since I started blogging and engaging in social networks ( twitter being my preferred and most fruitful) my horizons have massively expanded.   I have come across people and ideas that I never would have believed.

Things I would never have thought would happen:
- that over 2000 people from across the globe being bothered to read what I think.
- that Google would ask me to contribute to the Google Docs blog.
- that I would be working in a classroom where web 2.0 is real and contributing to children’s education.
- that I would be connected to people all over the world sharing ideas and a fair amount of waffle!
- that my iPhone would change everything.
- that I would be representing Deputy and Assistant heads at national level on the Naht National Council.
- that my little baby would change into my little girl.

Not all of these changes are attributable to my engagement online, but what is clear to me is that rather than bring at the end of a period of change, we’re only just at the beginning of a huge cultural and technological shift.   The only thing that is certain is that everything that we know and understand about learning is going to be turned on it’s head.  

It seems to my healthily sceptical eye that the only way to sift through the masses of ideas that are floating around is to engage with others and share ideas.   There is a lot of rubbish out there and the temptation, which I admit to falling into, is to find a ‘cool’ tool and say “how can I fit this into my lesson?”   This is the wrong way of going about things, but as we all know we have tom learn from our mistakes.   Having said that there are tools out there that really can be used creatively to enhance learning.

My top tools for learning:

• Spelling City
• Synchroneyes
• Any mindmapping software
• Photostory
• Edublogs
• Google Earth
• Google Docs
• Animoto
• Tutpup
• Twitter (for me)
• Google Sketchup

The next year has to be about refining these ideas and really fleshing plans to enhance children’s learning experiences.

What is clear though is that the focus of the whole process must be to use the technology to enhance learning, rather than to have a situation where using the technology becomes the learning.

Today I had one of the best lessons ever! To be honest it had nothing to do with the curriculum, but everything to do with fun, creativity and positivity in school. Like most of what I think are the best learning exeriences it was organic and basically unplanned.

After a particularly arduous rehearsal for the Christmas production I felt that the children needed a bit of a lift. I decided to let them loose on Pivot Stick Animator which I’ve been looking at for a while.

I decided to take a bit of a risk and announced that there eadbgoing to be a competition to see who could make their man do the best breakdance. I played the children a track from my iPhone and them let them loose. No instructions of anything.

I was amazed by the results that you can see bellow.

The children were completely engaged, belong each other, laughing and learning! It really was one of those moments that you’ll remember.

This week I tried to use wordle as an assessment tool in literacy. Children were shown a stimulus image of a man looking over the edge of a well and were then asked to write 100 words of character description. We then took everyone’s writing and put it into wordle.

The results were great! What became very clear was that the children were using phrases like “he looked like…” and hadn’t really used powerful descriptive words.

The great thing was that we could actually see the frequency of the words used by the size of the words in wordle.

Next week we’ll do some guided writing and repeat the process which should hopefully show a real difference.

I really liked this as an assessment method and would recommend that people tried this in their own classes.

Please have a look at my students blog www.charlestown.edublogs.org

If your students would like to comment please feel free, it would be great to set up a connection globally!

Exciting addition to the work I’ve been doing with Synchroneyes today! I got the children to use the chat feature to post research that they had found on the Internet about David Livingstone the Victorian explorer.

This worked incredibly well and led to a really interesting discussion with the children about chatting in general.

After the inital “Hi wassssaaaaapppp!” comments the children quickly started posting only relevant information. In fact they came and told me that they were getting annoyed with people who were still posting like that because it got in the way if the flow of information that they wanted to work on.

It struck me what a massive jump in real learning this was for these children, which completely quashed any fears that this was going to be a free for all chat a la msn.

All of this within five minutes!

I then got children working in smaller groups of six or seven to complete the task. They loved it and you could hear a pin drop in the classroom.

I asked the children what they liked about it and was amazed with the responses. Essentially they liked the fact that the chat was actually about something that they were learning about and that writing on the chat stopped “stupid conversations” starting and distracting them!

This from a class that loves to natter!

It was a great session that had some briliant learning outcomes for the children and me. Can’t wait to get back in on Monday and experiment further!

Over the last few weeks I’ve been using Smart’s Synchroneyes classroom management software to monitor children as they are working on the individual umpcs on the classroom.

I have to say that I think this could be some software that helps teachers hugely. Basically when children log on they have to connect to the teachers laptop wirelessly. The teacher then has control of what happens on that laptop. No great level of ict skill is required as at it’s simplest level the teacher can see thumbnails of each of the children’s screens and a small icon showing the program that is being used.

This gets around one of the biggest barriers that I have encountered whilst trying to spread good practice – namely teachers ate worried that they can’t see what the children are looking at on the screen. Now they can!

The other rather fantastic piece of practical functionality for the classroom is the lock feature. It does just what it says on the tin, at a click of a button all the laptops display the message “Eyes to the front please.”

This is hilarious when you see the children reactions the first time that you do it! Interestingly this has actually led to some interesting negotiation in my class as they don’t like being locked out and I have found that I’d really has improves the attention from the children when I ask them to stop.

Also you can pull up any examples of good work and send it to all the other screens, again a really practical tool in the classroom.

There are lots of other elements to the program that I haven’t fully explored as yet, such as setting up working groups, letting other children control each others monitors and ‘teach’.

There are some drawbacks. You need to have a pretty full on wireless network and processor for it not to become sticky. Also it doesn’t seem to enJoy the graphic intensive software such as google sketchup. Although that’s not really that suprising!

Overall though I would say it is definately worth looking at as I think it has the power to layer all the good aspects of traditional classroom practice over 21st century technology which is really exciting.